logoalt Hacker News

scotty79yesterday at 4:05 PM3 repliesview on HN

Why couldn't it be just a weirdly energetic neutrino originating from the neighborhood of some black hole?


Replies

physicsdudeyesterday at 5:53 PM

At some level, it could be (and that would be an great discovery as well!). It's a question of probabilities: it's unlikely to be any of the things that we already know about, but that doesn't mean that it's something new. Unlikely things happen --- infrequently. As stressed in the article and elsewhere in comments, more data should elucidate what is going on. That's the difficulty of these kinds of searches: there is one event, and we can't make clear, confident statements about one event.

hershkumartoday at 12:26 AM

I actually saw one of the authors present the data yesterday, one of the audience comments was indeed that this could be explained by an astrophysical neutrino striking the detector (all other neutrino sources have energy thresholds much lower than the detected data), but the data on astrophysical neutrinos is sparse (in part why detectors like IceCube exist), so I believe the argument is that the chances that an astrophysical neutrino would strike the detector is negligible.

show 1 reply
procflorayesterday at 5:56 PM

Based on my very amateurish skim of this and a related paper, maybe so? They simulated the neutrino background as solar and cosmic ray atmospheric sources, so any source with a different energy distribution is perhaps a possible explanation for the event, I think.

But probably more likely is for this to have been a particularly energetic event in the tail of one of the known sources of neutron recoil detection they did model. More events needed!